Green Beans

Fasolakia ladera is one of the defining dishes of the whole ladera family: green beans cooked slowly in olive oil and tomato with onion and often potatoes, until they are completely soft and the oil and tomato have thickened around them. The one thing a cook trained elsewhere has to accept is that these beans are not meant to be crisp, bright or squeaky.

Blanching them first and shocking them in ice water, standard practice in French and modern restaurant cooking, works directly against what the dish wants. The beans go into the pot raw and stay there for forty minutes or more, losing their colour and taking on the flavour of the oil, which is the point. Greek cooking judges a green bean by flavour rather than by colour.

Flat romano beans, wider and softer than thin French beans, hold up better over that long a cook and are closer to what is sold in a Greek market, though ordinary green beans work if the cooking time is watched. The dish is eaten warm or at room temperature with bread and a piece of feta, and it is generally considered better on the second day.